Design of a full C-band injector for ultra-high brightness electron beam

High gradient rf photo-injectors have been a key development to enable several applications of high quality electron beams. They allow the generation of beams with very high peak current and low transverse emittance, satisfying the tight demands for free-electron lasers, energy recovery linacs, Compton/Thomson sources and high-energy linear colliders. In the paper we present the design of a new full C-band RF photo-injector recently developed in the framework of the XLS-Compact Light design study and of the EuPRAXIA@SPARC_LAB proposal. It allows to reach extremely good beam performances in terms of beam emittance (at the level of few hundreds nm), energy spread and peak current. The photo-injector is based on a very high gradient (>200 MV/m) ultra-fast (RF pulses <200 ns) C-band RF gun, followed by two C band TW structures. Different types of couplers for the 1.6 cell RF gun have been considered and also a new compact low pulsed heating coupler working on the TM020 mode on the full cell has been proposed. In the paper we report the design criteria of the gun, the powering system, and the results of the beam dynamics simulations. We also discuss the case of 1 kHz repetition rate.